E-commerce veteran Adii Pienaar goes for the hattrick with new venture, Cogsy, reels in $5 million in Accel-led seed round

Inventory optimisation startup Cogsy has raised $5 million in a seed funding round. With its predictive analytics and planning features, the startup aims to assist, you guessed it, SME e-commerce sellers in achieving operational excellence. The new funding will allow the company to grow its team size and further expand operational functionality. Including a pre-seed round, Cogsy has now raised $6 million in total.

Co-founder Adii Pienaar is no stranger to the world of e-commerce. Having set up the ubiquitous e-commerce sales platform WooCommerce in 2007  (later acquired by Automattic for over $30 million), and e-commerce marketing tool Conversio in 2014 (later acquired by the CM Group for a number "around" $6.7 million), it would appear that for Pienaar, the seven-year itch really is a thing.

Going for the hattrick, Pienaar is now taking on the e-commerce logistics game with his newest venture, Cogsy. Arguing that a number of retail brands and merchants are still not up to speed on the pandemic-induced boom in e-commerce, with inventories and purchasing decisions still being made based on data extracted from spreadsheets, a painfully time-consuming, and human error-prone, process.

For Pienaar and co-founder Stefano Sala (former CTO at CM Commerce), Cogsy aims to junk the spreadsheets altogether and help SMEs make better sense of their data, and thereby, better decisions, through real-time monitoring of inventories, and company-wide visibility.

Armed with Cogsy’s offer, brands are provided with a rich, visual presentation of data that can automatically forecast sales, create recommended purchase orders, visualize purchasing patterns, and turn out-of-stock products into revenue streams by facilitating backorder purchases while keeping the customer in the loop on expected shipping dates.

Operating as a single source of truthiness across all business units, Cogsy also supports SME teams through a transparent, coordinated effort. A seemingly simple task, but if you’ve ever found yourself in the, “ummm, why are we the last to know about this?” situation at the office, you know exactly what I’m talking about. One of the aims of Cogsy is to eliminate this exact situation.

Now, this isn’t to say that Cogsy is operating alone in the space. By far. With e-commerce numbers exploding over the past two years, so have the number of startups angling to support the industry, and now Cogsy as well. However, given Pienaar and Sala’s unique backgrounds, there might just be some secret sauce under the hood. One that informed investors clearly want in on.

Cogsy’s $5 million seed round was led by Accel and saw Bain Capital Ventures, WooCommerce (Automattic), Sugar Capital, and RiverPark Ventures all participating. Angel investors including Casey Armstrong (CMO, ShipBob), Jay Myers (co-founder, Bold Commerce), Brian Long (co-founder and CEO, Attentive), Tomer Tagrin and Omri Cohen (co-founders, Yotpo) also showed their support.

"Few sectors have evolved as fast as e-commerce in recent years. Retail brands are taking advantage of this new landscape and orienting themselves around a digital-first approach. Yet when it comes to their ops functions, many are still using yesterday’s playbook. Cogsy is helping brands turn their ops function into engines of growth," commented Accel's Seth Pierrepont.

Hear more about the raise and the future of Cogsy directly from Adii himself at the company's podcast, The Checkout.